# John Jay Chapman

John Jay Chapman (March 2, 1862 – November 4, 1933) was an American writer.

## Early life

Chapman was born in New York City on March 2, 1862. He was a son of Henry Grafton Chapman Jr. (1833–1883), a broker who became president of the New York Stock Exchange, and Eleanor Kingsland Jay (1839–1921).
His paternal grandmother, Maria Weston Chapman, was one of the leading campaigners against slavery and worked with William Lloyd Garrison on The Liberator. His maternal grandparents were John Jay (1817–1894), the U.S. Minister to Austria-Hungary, and Eleanor Kingsland (née Field) Jay (1819–1909). His grandfather was a son of William Jay and a grandson of Chief Justice John Jay of the United States Supreme Court.
Chapman was educated at St. Paul's School, in Concord, New Hampshire, and at Harvard University. After graduating from Harvard in 1884, he toured Europe before resuming his studies at the Harvard Law School.

## Career

He was admitted to the bar in 1888, and practiced law until 1898. Meanwhile, he had attracted attention as an essayist of unusual merit. His work is marked by originality and felicity of expression, and the opinion of many critics has placed him in the front rank of the American essayists of his day.
In 1912, on the one-year anniversary of the lynching of Zachariah Walker in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, Chapman gave a speech in which he called the lynching "one of the most dreadful crimes in history" and said "our whole people are...involved in the guilt." It was published as A Nation's Responsibility.
Chapman became involved in politics and joined the City Reform Club and the Citizens' Union. He was opposed to the Tammany Hall political and business grouping, which at that time dominated New York City. He lectured on the need for reform and edited the journal The Political Nursery (1897-1901).

## Personal life

Chapman was known as a passionate romantic in his personal life as well as his writing. As a law student at Harvard, he once beat a rival (astronomer Percival Lowell) for a woman's love in a fight, then felt such deep remorse that he deliberately burned off his left hand as a form of self-punishment. He would later brandish the stump as evidence of his passion.
On July 2, 1889, he married Minna Timmins (1861–1897), with whom he had three children:
* Victor Emmanuel Chapman (1890–1916), the first American aviator to die in France during World War I. After Victor's death, Chapman published a memoir of his son's early life, including his letters sent from France. The letters inspired the composer Charles Loeffler, a friend of Chapman's, to write the string quartet, Music for Four Stringed Instruments.
* John Jay Chapman, Jr. (1893–1903), who drowned at Romerbad, Austria, age 9.
* Conrad Chapman (1896–1989), who was engaged to Dorothy Daphne McBurney (1912–1997) in 1934, but married Judith Daphne Kemp (1906–1999) in England in 1937.
On April 23, 1899, Chapman married Elizabeth Astor Winthrop Chanler (1866–1937), the second daughter of John Winthrop Chanler and Margaret Astor Ward (of the Astor family). The soldier and explorer William A. Chanler was her brother. They had one child:
* Chanler Armstrong Chapman (1901–1982), who married Olivia James, a niece of Henry James. They divorced and in 1948, he married the former Helen Riesenfeld, a writer. After her death in 1970, he married Dr. Ida R. Holzbert Wagman in 1972. Chanler Chapman reportedly served as a model for Eugene Henderson, the main character in Saul Bellow's 1959 novel Henderson the Rain King.
John Jay Chapman died on November 4, 1933, in Poughkeepsie, New York. His funeral, held at Christ Church on West 71st Street, New York City, was attended by hundreds. Elizabeth Chapman died in 1937.